Is Scott Galloway out of Touch?

For the first time in my life, I attended a Sunday service at a Unitarian Universalist Church, to see Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, in dialog with the pastor. I was curious to hear what this progressive Black mayor had to say to a progressive Northside (White) church.

The pastor began the service with an announcement.

“The Unitarian Universalist Church was established by and for people who do not believe in hell.”

“Whaat?” I was so startled I hardly heard the rest of the preamble. I don’t believe in hell. No one I know believes in hell. But I’ve never heard nor would I ever expect to hear such good news from any church pulpit.

But wait, there’s more good news! The “UU’s” reject original sin, believe in a God who loves and redeems all human beings, and trains congregants in social justice work. These are my beliefs too.

The bias I’ve had against the Unitarian Universalist Church stems from old thinking that Unitarianism is a heretical religion because they don’t display a cross. Where did I get that crap? Since I’ve been attending a Presbyterian Church for over 45 years, it must have slipped into my head when I was half asleep some Sunday morning.

Speaking of old ideas, on Friday, December 5, podcaster Scott Galloway responded to a young man who asked:

“How do I get more involved in politics?”

Galloway said “… because young people don’t vote, old people keep voting themselves more money, right? $40 billion child tax credit gets ripped out of the infrastructure bill, but the $120 billion cost of living adjustment for Social Security flies right through.

…our old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money, and the fact that people under the age of 18 don’t vote, the budget reflects values, and our values are that we don’t really love our children.”*

This is a typical Scott Galloway motivator: money. He will happily reveal how much he’s worth and how he manipulated the modern system to get there. But his statement pitting the young against the old using the antiquated idea that we old citizens are sapping federal dollars from the young shows a decided lack of sophistication and reality.

First of all, we want young people to succeed. We were young Pete Buttigieg’s biggest voting bloc, long before he announced his Gray New Deal in Iowa 2020. We vote for SNAP and child tax credits. We volunteer at food kitchens, tutor at public schools, babysit our grandchildren and are worried about ours, yours and future generations.

Secondly, we pay. We will pay the government $202.90 a month in 2026 for Medicare Part B, which covers doctor’s visits. That’s a 9.7 percent increase from 2025. We count on the Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) to offset that Medicare increase. But in 2026, the Social Security COLA is only a 2.8 percent increase, posing a hardship for Social Security recipients who live check to check in this era of (non) affordability.

Third, don’t we all know that the way young people get involved in politics is to volunteer? What? Is that just a Chicago thing?

After 40 years, curiosity brought me, 79 years old, to an unexpected new idea about the Unitarian Universalist Church.

Let’s hope Scott Galloway, 61years old, becomes curious enough to come to a new idea about how the real world works.

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You can find Scott Galloway’s email address here:

*The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway: How to Get Involved in Politics, How Scott Galloway Writes, and How He Follows the News, Dec 5, 2025https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-get-involved-in-politics-how-scott-galloway/id1498802610?i=1000739823645&r=196.38 This material may be protected by copyright.

Chicagoans: People of the Water

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Chicago is a water town. Lake Michigan and the sky above are our watermarks, the invisible identifier embedded in the soul of anyone who lives here for more than a year, or so. We are built around the lakeshore, the river banks, the canals, the bridges. Oh those bridges! For the next two to three years, three downtown bridges over the Chicago River are closed for repair. I know the river. I know those bridges. Whenever I’m a passenger in a car headed toward the Chicago River, I, a non-driver, turn into a navigational virtuoso.

“Turn left on La Salle Street! Now! Go to Jackson and make a right. Yes, Jackson.”

I’m insufferable. And always right.

Once you’ve lived anywhere in Chicago with even the thinnest view of the lake or the river, you can never go back, never not have water in your sights. Magical is an inadequate adjective. It’s cellular. What must it have been like for those who settled this land we call Chicago? Did a wild black and blue sky moving over Lake Michigan shout danger to our native ancestors? On windy days, did the lake and river together kick up such a fuss that the confluence was unnavigable? Were their beliefs tied to a cellular connection between the water, the land, the ancestors? Dare we imagine that those first peoples inseminated future generations, yes us, with a cellular connection to the water?

My favorite visitors are those whose excitement about the Chicago Harbor Lock exceeds mine. The Lock is at the confluence of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. It is part of multiple locks and dams that allow water from Lake Michigan to flow inland, toward the mighty Mississippi. Chicago devised reversing the flow of the river in the 1900s to send our sewage downstream, away from our beloved lake. Lucky for us. Unlucky for St. Louis.

Boats and cargo ships moving from the river to the lake first enter the lock and tie up. Like a water elevator, the water raises or lowers to meet the level of the lake. I’ve been on tourist boats waiting in line on either side for tankers and cargo boats to get through the Lock. Thousands of Chicagoans live in high-rises with floor to ceiling windows where they can pull up their work desk and chair and watch the Lock all day long as they work from home. What a great city. This water town.

In mid-September, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents were dispatched to Chicago as part of the Trump Administration’s ICE operation to arrest illegal immigrants with criminal records. They announced themselves by cruising up and down our cherished Chicago River, in and out of tour boats and kayaks. Some were masked. All were uniformed. All were armed with semi-automatic long guns. How did such an invasion get through the Lock?

Since that absurd melodramatic entrance into our city, the CBP has cruised into neighborhoods in military vehicles, springing into action to terrorize Chicagoans, citizens and non-citizens.

Chicago responded with multiple layers of volunteer rapid response teams covering every scenario of civic and private life. New and old activists carry whistles to alert neighbors of CPD/ICE presence on our streets. Neighborhood school patrols walk children to school.

The Customs and Border Patrol floated into Chicago with 250 agents. There’s reason to believe that number is reduced to 100 for the winter. One of their most horrific tools, tear gas, doesn’t work in cold weather. They’ve gone off to warmer climes for training — to figure out how to deal with the likes of Chicagoans. Reportedly they will be back a thousand fold in the spring.

Oh these blue-minded Chicagoans.

These people of the water.

Will be ready.
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“Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”― Nelson Algren

Broadview: Silent Resistance

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The announcement of a “Peace is our Protest” silent meditation hit my incoming a few weeks ago. I asked my Zoom meditation group to join me at The Broadview ICE Detention Center outside Chicago.

“I thought you were joking!” Rita said afterwards.

And why wouldn’t she think it was a joke? Since the start of the Trump Administration’s Operation Midway Blitz in late 2025, Broadview has been newsworthy. Masked men in military costumes with automatic weapons shoot protesters in the head with pepper balls that explode into disabling chemicals. Demonstrators have been wrestled to the ground, zip-tied and arrested. Who in our group of graying meditators with varying degrees of mobility and vitality would be going someplace like that?

Well, Abigail and I did go. It was an easy drive. We arrived early. There were a few people already settled on their meditation mats, facing west. We set our lawn chairs down behind them. All was quiet. Two noisy protesters yelled out from time to time but experienced meditators treat ambient noise as neutral thoughts, not sound. We followed their piety and remained unstirred. Silent. Eyes closed. Forty-five minutes passed. A gong sounded. We stretched.

“Look behind us,” Abigail whispered.

Over my shoulder I caught sight of about two hundred people. Sitting. Quietly. These valorous contemplatives came in behind us and squatted so softly we had no idea they were even there.

“I tried silent protesting and it never works!” A noisy bystander on a bike screamed at us.

No one responded. No one felt compelled to yell back, argue, persuade. We remained silent.

An unnamed man read a passage from Gandhi on non-violent resistance. We then folded our chairs and walked softheartedly to the car. As I passed by an Illinois State Trooper, he locked eyes with mine and said, “Thank you for coming.”

Broadview, an immigration processing center constructed in the 1970s, is a spit from the interstate highway leading to downtown Chicago. For thirteen years, a vigil at Broadview has been organized by the Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants. Every Friday morning, Sisters of Mercy Pat Murphy and JoAnn Persch have led peacekeepers in prayer for detainees, some of whom are in transit to other facilities or are awaiting deportation.

“We are brothers and sisters, and it doesn’t make any difference the color of our skin or our religion or the country we come from,” Sister Murphy says, “we believe in one human being to another, a theology of presence.”

At the silent meditation protest we neither asked for nor received answers. No conclusions. No changes. No one needed to be there. We came to be present. A living theology of presence. I call this God. Others call it something else — the universe, spiritual essence, nature, mindfulness, other God names.

A week later the whole world watched millions peacefully protest at No Kings’ rallies. In Chicago, I walked all around the Butler Field rally in Grant Park and saw very few hateful slogans on signs. I’ve never seen such a noble protest. We marched up Michigan Avenue converging with streams of others walking from the south and west carrying woke messages.

Love not hate.

Faith Over Fear.

Love Your Neighbor.

The Woodstock Nation. Long may it last.

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Satyāgraha, from Sanskrit: “holding firmly to truth”, is a particular form of nonviolent resistance or civil resistance. The term was coined and developed by Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948). Gandhi proposed a series of rules to follow in a resistance campaign:

Harbor no anger.
Suffer the anger of the opponent.
Never retaliate to assaults or punishment, but do not submit, out of fear of punishment or assault, to an order given in anger.
Voluntarily submit to arrest or confiscation of your own property.
If you are a trustee of property, defend that property (non-violently) from confiscation with your life.
Do not curse or swear.
Do not insult the opponent.
Neither salute nor insult the flag of your opponent or your opponent’s leaders.
If anyone attempts to insult or assault your opponent, defend your opponent (non-violently) with your life.
As a prisoner, behave courteously and obey prison regulations (except any that are contrary to self-respect).
As a prisoner, do not ask for special favorable treatment.
As a prisoner, do not fast in an attempt to gain conveniences whose deprivation does not involve any injury to your self-respect.
Joyfully obey the orders of the leaders of the civil disobedience action.

Texas Goodness

Something fluttered around me, as if I’d stepped into a web of butterflies. But I hadn’t. Butterflies were off in the distance. On the Nature Boardwalk surrounding the marshy South Pond in Lincoln Park I was soaking in the August-blooming bubblegum-colored big-flowered swamp mallows. And there on a daisy branch sat a goldfinch. And another, on a farther branch. Hidden in the yellow coneflowers were a few more, pecking at seeds. Goldfinches had entered my airspace as they headed for the wild prairie flowers at the swamp’s edge. Goodness nurturing goodness.

My held-breath whispered, “You know, Regan, God did not have to give us the goldfinch.” At that moment, as others before it, I believed in God. The previous morning, fearing all goodness had vanished from the earth, I assumed God, like the butterflies, had flittered off in the distance, out of sight, out of the picture.

I lost my faith in goodness for the umpteenth time the day President Trump told Texas Governor Greg Abbott to redistrict Texas in order to gain five more gerrymandered Republican Congressional seats. Americans, who vote with their pockets, are realizing everything they buy to survive in this world since Trump became President has skyrocketed. Because of that, commentators suggest Trump is afraid we’ll all vote against his MAGA party in the 2026 mid-term elections yielding more Democrats in Congress. Cynics say Trump needs more Republicans in Congress in case he declares an “election emergency” and tells Congress to appoint him for another term.

No one need explain redistricting to me. In the 1980s I worked in the Illinois legislature where computerized gerrymandering was invented in the basement. Drawing legislative lines to benefit Democratic incumbents was de riguer, not just acceptable, but expected. No one uttered the word gerrymander then. Today, Illinoisans are surprised to hear Republicans scoffing that their state takes the cake on gerrymandering. The secret is out.

Republican Governor Abbott yielded to Trump’s demand. He introduced a newly drawn map with the five added Republican Congressional seats to the Texas legislature. The Democratic Texas lawmakers promptly left the state. The Texas legislature needs those Democrats in the Austin capital to make up the necessary quorum to vote on that map.

And those Texas Freedom Fighters, as they’re described at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, are housed in a high-security hotel outside of Chicago. They’ve had bomb scares and death threats. They cannot move around without security. I can’t think of a lower hell than being far from home stowed away in an exurb hotel with no end in sight.

One of the exiled Texans, James Talarico from Austin, attends a Christian seminary to ground himself in the fight against White Christian Nationalism that’s roiling the Texas legislature. A nurturing goodness, he speaks of hope and love and responsibility to the United States.

These Texans, these democracy heroes, are saving us from the worst of gut-wrenching trumpism. When the day comes to proclaim their victory, let’s stroll around the Nature Boardwalk among the goldfinches, daisies and butterflies, nurturing goodness.

Maybe then God will come back into the picture.

More about James Talarico

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Fear of Kudzu City

The gardeners in the small neighborhood park I call my own, butchered the beauty out of the spring flowers and attendant bird migration. In their zeal to prune away the dead and diseased tree branches, they yanked out all non-native “invasive” species. This disrupted the seasonal pattern of our expectations. As I wandered through the other day, a neighbor with her spaniel in tow stopped me.

“What happened to our flowers?” She yelled across the boxwood.
“The gardeners mulched it all into last years’ compost.” I said. I don’t know her, but here we were joined by a sudden mutual experience.
“They went too far! Can’t you do something about it?”

Me? I must have spoken with authority about the Chicago Park District’s program to remove invasive species and introduce native plants. As usual, I imparted knowledge based on next to nothing. Last summer as my allergies exploded, I read an article in the Chicago Tribune about the Park District planting more allergen-producing native plants, like goldenrod. A passing employee of the Chicago Park District once educated me on the park’s introduction of native plants, especially those glorious hibiscus. And a neighbor who is a volunteer gardener at the Lincoln Park Zoo spends her summer eliminating “invasives”. That’s the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

“You can go to the Park District Board meetings and ask about it,” was my know-it-all answer.

But Nature has once again reigned supreme in my city neighborhood. On my street, there is no human control over the crow’s nest and its four chicks that are flapping around in the branches. I watch them strengthen their young wings to fly out from their birthplace and fend for themselves. Wildlife never needs permission to be. But it does need protection.

The New York Times reported this week on one of Chicago’s best nature stories. The Lakeside Center at McCormick Place applied a treatment on its glass building to deter migrating birds from banging into it. Last year up to 1,000 birds died in one night at McCormick Place. This year, the deaths, due to the widow treatment, were down by 95%. Chicago’s unpopular mayor should take credit. For some of us this fact alone is enough to vote for his reelection.

Unfortunately there’s no treatment we can apply to protect ourselves from bumping up against the current man-made enemy that is called the United States of America. What can protect us from dirty air and water unleashed by industrial, vehicle and power plant toxins?

I envision a doomsday scenario, a post-apocalyptic environment like “the Last of Us.” Will my city’s native species die off and be replaced by invasive, toxic-loving kudzu? The White Christian Nationalists setting ecological policy have abandoned the Bible as their guide. Genesis 2:15, in all versions, clearly states we must tend to God’s creation.

NIV: The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

KJV: And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

NLT: The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it.

CSB: The LORD God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.

NYT: An Illinois Building Was a Bird Killer. A Simple Change Made a World of Difference.

Chicago’s Urban Wildlife: Embracing Pluralism and Nature

All over early-morning Chicago, garbage trucks back in and out of alleys using rapid beep-beep-beep signals announcing their hulking presence. Elsa the dog and I are indifferent to this annoyance as we take our morning walk. But in mid-April, we both jumped to attention. We heard what seemed like a hundred garbage trucks backing up. The wildly unfamiliar bellowed from a block down the street.

“What’s going on Elsa?” I shouted down to my agitated Westie on the sidewalk. All of a sudden two honking Sandhill Cranes flew through the center of the street below the treetops. Their wingspan swooped past us from sidewalk to sidewalk as they glided and bellowed toward Lake Michigan.

Elsa flew into a barking rage. I lost my breath. My knees buckled. The Sandhill Crane is an ancient animal whose sole purpose is entertainment.

I love these four-foot high red-headed trumpeting birds. I once traveled to the Platte River on the edge of Nebraska’s Sandhills for their spring migration. My friends and I joined serious birders on the 5:00 am riverbank to view 600,000 roosting Sandhill Cranes. Their summer and winter homes are the northern and southern edges of the Great Plains. They are North Americans, Midwesterners.

Where did this duo come from and where were they going? They were likely in a flock following the Great Lakes Flyway, the migration route to their summer home in the boundary waters between the U.S. and Canada. Perhaps they were lured away by a mischief of rats feasting on the overflowing garbage bins in the alleys of nearby restaurants. Did a garage truck disturb their hunt? Whatever the story, I am deeply grateful they strayed from the flock and flew into my morning fugue.

Fugue? Yes, lately every morning I awake in a seemingly altered state. Oh, I tend a regular household routine, brain-fogged by radio news from the psycho-battleground that is my home country. Any diversion is welcome, particularly wildlife making its way through my city street.

But diversions, like bird spotting, are fleeting. The pluralistic society we’ve known as democracy is under siege. Pluralism, a word as ancient as the Sandhills themselves, one we learned in middle school, has been displaced of late by DEI or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. DEI was corporate America’s answer to the communal guilt stemming from the sight of George Floyd’s on-air murder. The lofty goal of transforming Human Resource departments into offices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion crashed and burned on the heels of Donald Trump’s name-calling presidential candidate Kamala Harris a “DEI” hire. Little did we know then, the summer of 2024. The weaponizing of DEI was not a diversion. Instead, it was a tactic in a larger strategy to destroy pluralism and make America White and Christian.

Interfaith America, the nation’s premier interfaith organization, has come to the battlefield now — taking the case for pluralism to the streets. A giant digital billboard in one of the most diverse locations in the country, Times Square, New York City, shows Interfaith America’s devotion to American pluralism. The message: diversity makes our country stronger. I’m in here, proud to represent my cohort, old white ladies with their dogs. Take a look.

Our President, Our Enemy

At Saturday morning coffee in downtown Chicago, a friend and naturalized citizen joined our small group. They work (or by now, worked) at a federal agency where half the workforce had just been fired.

“Are you next?” I asked.

“I wrote a list of things I can do to make money. Nothing to do with my profession but at least I have options,” they said, “I have EU passport and know some languages. My European colleagues are already strengthening connections between their countries. There’ll be jobs.”

Watching TV on February 28, I was like a six-year old sitting cross-legged in front of a life-size screen expecting it to throw itself at me. The Trump-Vance shakedown of Ukraine President Zelensky in the Oval Office presented TV reporters and viewers with a clear and present danger. The US just changed sides. We would now be the puppet ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The reporting immobilized me. What happened to Putin the mortal enemy? Another historical norm thrown onto the MAGA heap of used-to-be’s. Cafe societies the next day ratcheted up conversations about how to leave the country.

Our President was now our enemy.

How I want to write more about my friend! Their story about growing up behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War intrigues this nosy Midwesterner. But I fear exposing my friend to gotcha algorithms that worm around the internet. I even write “they/them” so the sex can’t be identified.

They said, “Big difference between here and country of my childhood. Before the breakup of USSR, you’d be killed if you wrote forbidden words.”

Alexander Dugin, a friend of Putin’s, on the day of Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, proclaimed that “traditionalism won. Globalism lost. A victory for Russia.”

Globalism has been the hallmark of the devil in fundamentalist Christianity since before Jimmy Carter’s presidency. At my small fundamentalist Christian church in the 1970s, a friend pulled me aside one Sunday during coffee hour. She said Jimmy Carter’s White House Conference on the Family was diabolic. We were both former hippies. We grew cabbage in our back yards. We made our own yogurt. We balanced our immune systems with apple cider vinegar. I thought I knew her.

A Christian convert, she’d been exposed to the idea that Carter would lay out his progressive American family values. Then spread those ideals around the world through programs like USAID.

“Carter is promoting globalism,” she said. “He wants all families to think like him.”

Preposterous? Yeah. I thought so too.

New York Times columnist, David French, is the original Never-Trumper. An evangelical Christian, French teaches history and the constitution. He explains Trumpism from a biblical point of view. Prophesying Christians, Pentecostals and traditionalists believe the Devil is the force behind globalism. Prophesied in the Bible. These Christians tell Trump he’s God’s man to lead America out of the spiritual darkness of globalism, especially because he survived a gunshot to the head. Trump’s leadership in anti-globalism, divvying up the world pie between the four leaders, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, is victory over the Devil. Oh.Yeah.

Long before Trump, when insecurity and doubt began settling in my young joints, I was desperate for certainty. I fell for these biblical prophesies, these absolutes. I sobered up, married and mothered a boy. I worked in a stain glass factory and had a garden. Despite these, I fell into a years-long fever dreams submitting to charismatic prophesying men. When I woke, a Presbyterian preacher told me doubt was good, certainty wasn’t. Putting church friends behind me, I rejected the prophecies of Christian fundamentalism.

Strangely, I thought everyone else did too.

MLK: “…only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

On a podcast about grief, artist Laurie Anderson revealed to Anderson Cooper that she felt sad without being sad when her husband, rocker Lou Reed died in 2013. She came to this awareness at a class on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The teacher, Bob Thurman, said there is no dead. Dead doesn’t exist. He was referring, in part, to post mortem existence.

Different concepts of the afterlife exist in most religions and philosophies. For atheists who believe nothing happens after death, Thurman, a Tibetan Buddhist, teaches there is no nothing. Dead is not nothing.

I’m about as sure of what happens when the body breathes its last as I am of next week’s weather. Oh, I tacitly agree with those who suggest I’ll see my dead dogs again, the same way I concur it’s going to snow tomorrow. Maybe. Maybe not. Surely, dead is not nothing?

On November 22,1963, my mother called from New Jersey to the Catholic boarding school where I was sent to “shape up” in Williamsburg, Virginia. I picked up the black handle dangling from its stretched out cord in the one allowable phone booth for us wayward boarders.

“Kennedy’s been shot.” She said.

I replied, “I know. He’s dead. It’s on the radio.”

There’s a reason my mother called me. She knew, even at seventeen years old that I’d be upset, more like hysterical. Politics had grabbed me as a pre-teenager watching the Vietnam war on TV. By the time Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, I, a twenty-two year old hippie, had been to two marches on Washington and written hundreds of letters to Congress and President Johnson. I was in support of the Civil Rights bill, the Voting Rights bill, banning the bomb and against the Vietnam war. Anytime the morning news stirred an injustice I had to fix, I reached for my stash of pre-stamped postcards to fire off messages to Congress. I harangued my friends—at work, in bars, on the beach, at parties—to think and talk like me. They didn’t. I kept going.

MLK’s admonition, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter,” initially whipped me into a frenzy of activism—more letters, more phone calls, more marches, more recruiting. Then in his “Drum Major Instinct,” speech in 1968 he preached to act as a servant, not a savior. It is noble to help just one person, change one person’s viewpoint, get one person to vote. Gradually, I adhered to King’s spirit and put into practice a daily mindfulness mantra: the worries of the world don’t own me, I don’t own the worries of the world.

DNA has proven dead is not dead. DNA, our physical manifestation of life itself, apparently lives forever. Anyone who has had a DNA test questions their reported trace variants of first peoples like Neanderthal listed in their results, as if our DNA was there at the beginning, or, before? Some religions teach physical immortality, that our dead bodies will rise (or have risen) to live in Paradise. It begs the question: wherever our raised bodies take up residence, will they have our same DNA?

Martin Luther King’s DNA lives in the generative marrow of his words. I always feel sad, without being sad on this day, his birthday, like Laurie Anderson grieving over Lou Reed. His death forever transitions into the endorphins between my dreams and awareness. He lives in that zero-gravity mirage of my inner life that says: serve, get out there, be brave, do it, say it.

Yep. Dead is not nothing.

Listen: Laurie Anderson & Anderson Cooper

(updated from 2023 MLK day)

Cold Inaugurations

As an eighth grader I entered segregated St. Mary’s of the Assumption for two months at the end of the school year. My family had come apart in the Chicago suburbs and one of my sisters and I were sent to live with relatives in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Whites and Blacks mingled at St.Mary’s only on the playground where I pitched in the integrated baseball games.

On our first Sunday at St. Mary’s Church, my sister and I headed for the back pews. A white man ushered us out of our seats toward the front. Only Blacks sat in the back. The Sunday my mother visited from her temporary home in New Jersey, she pushed the usher aside and sat us all in the back. Her hangovers would not allow suffering through the entire hour of the Mass. She needed a quick exit after the obligatory Eucharist and delighted in integrating the back pew.

One day St. Mary’s eighth grade class was bussed down the way to Andrews Air Force Base to greet President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Blacks in the back of the bus. Whites in the front. Having so little experience with segregation, I was sure it was wrong but had no idea how to take a stand. I wished my mother had come along to integrate the bus. We waved little American flags at President Eisenhower as he deplaned Air Force One, Blacks lined up on one side, whites on the other. It was 1959.

Sixteen years later in a sleepy Jersey Shore borough, I read about Jimmy Carter’s campaign for president in Time Magazine. What caught my attention was Carter, as governor, in a surprise to fellow Georgians had denounced racism and segregation. I sent a note to Jimmy Carter, applauded his positions on race and volunteered on his campaign. He sent me a hand written thank you note.

When we received an invitation to Carter’s Inauguration, there was no question that my then-husband and nine-year old son would head to Washington DC for the January 1977 swearing-in. Sitting high up on bleachers on the shady side of the Capitol, it was as cold as any day I can remember. Twenty-eight degrees with a wind chill to equal fourteen.

My grandchildren, C.J. and Kirby, were 10 and 12, when we flew from Chicago to brave twenty degrees with 1.8 million others for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. We stood for hours on the frozen ground by the Native American Museum on the Mall. Every once in a while I’d ask my shivering grandchildren if they wanted to go inside. No they didn’t! The clutch of strangers that formed in our section treated us like family—retrieving packs of hand warmers from a far-away tent for the inside of our mittens and boots.

It was sunny. Cold. And glorious.

Obama quoted Founding Father Thomas Paine in his in Inaugural address.

”Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet.”

The DOGE and Aging

Adlai Stevenson III (1930 – 2021) entered the 1982 race for Illinois governor just as I had become unemployed. My only memory of that forsaken job, like all the others, is my shameful obsequiousness to the forgettable male boss.

A journalist friend, Paul Galloway (1934-2009) interceded on my behalf to the Stevenson campaign for a volunteer position. Yes, that was necessary. And still. The sublime expression, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent,” originated in a Chicago ward campaign office. Campaigns still scrutinize volunteers with more than an eye roll. Because of my juice through the local newspaper, people were cautious about what was said around me.

I floundered around the office of Adlai Stevenson’s wife, Nancy, who was usually out campaigning. One day, I had the great fortune to be tagged to drive her to Oak Park for an event. That fluke set off a campaign-long assignment as Nancy’s driver.

Nancy and I regularly stepped into community rooms where older adults were having lunch through the federal Meals on Wheels program. Older women would clasp Nancy’s wrist, pull her ear close to their lips and whisper messages for her to take back to her husband. The Meals on Wheels crowd assumed Adlai III was his father, Adlai II, the governor when most of them were young. Nancy, who had a gentle and keen understanding of aging, let most of them hold this holy untruth. She displayed genuine kindness in her friendly interactions with old people who were in obvious cognitive decline. This helped me admit my own subconscious bias toward the aging. My ageism has changed overtime, especially now that I’m old and experience age discrimination against myself and my friends.

Meals on Wheels is funded through the Older Americans Act Nutrition Program which was permanently authorized by Congress in 1972. The purpose is three-fold: 1) reduce hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition; 2) promote socialization; 3) promote health and well-being by preventing health-related diseases. The Program is available to adults age 60 years and older. Priority is given to low-income individuals, racial or ethnic minorities, rural communities, those with limited English proficiency, and/or those at risk of institutionalization.

One of our campaign stops was a community space in the neighborhood of Hegewich. It is located on the far south side of Chicago, known as the perfect workingman’s neighborhood. When Chicago’s steel mills shut down in the 1980s, the Polish immigrants who’d settled in Hegewich lost their jobs. They also lost their pensions. People survived on government subsistence and odd jobs.

As Nancy began her round of shaking hands, bobbing up and down to lean over to hear the messages of the elderly, she announced, “You know, my husband, Ad, voted for Meals-on-Wheels when he was a senator in Washington.”

Before she could get out another word, a large woman in the corner who looked like a George Booth cartoon yelled:

“Yeah? Well, he oughta be here now for the corned beef! ‘Cause it stinks!”

“Well, I’ll be sure to tell Adlai!” Nancy shouted back.

Funding runs out on December 31, 2024 for the Older Americans Act and the Meals on Wheels Program. If Congress doesn’t vote to reauthorize the Act, the Nutrition Program will be at the mercy of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And they have vowed to eliminate all programs that have not been reauthorized by Congress.

My guess is neither of them have come to terms with ageism.

Regan Burke

Author "In That Number" from local booksellers or Amazon

Tag: politics